Thursday, June 05, 2008

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary! ... by Alan Caruba

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

by Alan Caruba

***********************

I watch the TV news when I get up in the morning and when I have dinner. It's been Hillary, Hillary, Hillary all day long. When will she concede? Is she bargaining for the VP slot? Will she take the fight to the convention in Denver?

Everyone by now should know that Barack Obama has the nomination all sewed up. Just check the front page of your local daily. There is no longer any question about that.

But the liberal mainstream media is (and has been) so besotted with the Clinton’s, Bill and Hillary, that they cannot look at this change in the Democrat Party power structure in any other way than to ask what Hillary intends to do about it. She can do nothing. She has nothing with which to bargain.

Those 18 million votes she received do not mean squat at this point. She does not “control” them in any meaningful way. Those voters will decide whether to switch allegiance to Obama, vote for McCain, or just stay home. Meanwhile, her delegates are just waiting word to be released.

I'm betting that Hillary will do as little as possible when it comes to campaigning for Obama after the convention. She will make a showing, but she will not tour 50 states on his behalf. And afterwards she will return to her Senate seat and tend to the business of New York State. Look at it this way, when was the last time you heard or read anything about John Kerry?

I have little doubt that it has begun to dawn on the Clinton’s that this is a new era, a shift from the "old" Democrat Party when they ran the show to a "new" one that began when Howard Dean emerged as its chairman. That was the writing on the wall. It is a party that has shifted so radically to the Left that Obama was almost ordained to be its choice. It took him a mere five months to go from virtual anonymity to destroy Hillary's seemingly invincible hold on the nomination.

As this radicalism begins to emerge in the course of the campaign between Obama and McCain, the voters—excluding those on the Far Left and Far Right fringe of the two parties—are going to cautiously look for a middle position, a safe place politically where too much “change” will be regarded as a dangerous choice.

It will be a close election because the nation is as politically polarized as Washington, D.C. has been since the 1994 shift of power to the Republicans and their subsequent excesses and abuses of that power. In the end, though, I think a nice old white man is going to be the choice, one who often sounds like a Democrat.

Hillary will write another book and Bill will take on a few more speech dates to help cover her campaign debts. The odds suggest that the glory days for Hillary are over. She lost.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/. He blogs at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/.

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